Tagged: Extreme 105

It has been a long time coming, but now an average broadband subscriber in the U.S. can sign-up for a 100 Mbps broadband connection. Comcast, the largest cable (and broadband) company said Thursday it’s launching Extreme 105 across its entire footprint, which covers 40 million homes in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle; Chicago; Miami; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; and the majority of Boston.

To be sure, companies such as Cablevision provide 100 Mbps connections in its region (New York), but Comcast is making it available at a national level. Forecasts have indicated we could have 100 million homes with 100 Mbps by 2015, and with Thursday’s news, we’re pretty close to that target now. That should make the FCC pretty happy.

Now, it’s not cheap: about $105 a month for the broadband connection if you sign up for a triple-play plan, where other services cost extra. The standalone price is pretty darn steep — $199 a month — which I think is a shame. Comcast should have sold this at a more affordable price….A Comcast spokesperson says that their 250 GB cap applies to this super-fast broadband connection as well…

Netflix, Hulu, AppleTV, Spotify and Pandora make up most of my [Om’s] digital content diet. When it comes to work, it’s now all in the “cloud” via Google Docs and Gmail. With higher bandwidth, the experience of all these services has improved for me. With Comcast making the higher speeds available nationwide, the upside is going to be for all these streaming services.I predict they will see a big bump in usage.

It’s a shame Comcast is initiating this service as if it was 2007 and the Great Recession hadn’t happened, yet. Anyone on a fixed income has been spending the last few years cutting back – not expanding their discretionary bump.

At the moment it feels like I have an increase in download/streaming speed with my much less expensive Comcast broadband. That may be a temporary side effect while they tune and tweak the changes they’ve made. I was getting upload speeds comparable to download for spell while they engaged their throttling system and that has settled down to a 5mbps maximum.